Star Trek: The Motion Picture (20th Anniversary Collectors' Edition)

Album Review

Issued in 1999 after some considerable delay (and heavily available as a promo before that), this double-CD set corrects a lot of the mistakes that were made on the original LP and CD releases. For starters, there are about 20 more minutes of music from the film here — Columbia Records obviously wanted to hold the original LP release to one disc, but they still could have gotten most, if not all, of the extra material on. The additional music isn't anything profound, because all of the major thematic material was represented on the original LP and its CD equivalent — it's mostly just more of the Vejur oscillations over dark orchestral chords, but anything that gets more Jerry Goldsmith music into print is intrinsically OK. Indeed, listening to the full score here, it is more apparent than ever just how important Goldsmith's score was to the lethargically paced, deeply troubled film — almost all of the majesty, excitement, and mystery that the screen was supposed to present actually resides in the music, and Goldsmith probably deserved an Academy Award, not just a nomination, for his contribution to this movie. Additionally, one of the new tracks, "Spock's Arrival," may be the closest that Goldsmith has ever come to writing serious music in a pure Romantic idiom; this could have been the work of Rimsky-Korsakov or Stravinsky — it's that good. And all of the music has been remastered in state-of-the-art 20-bit sound, so the previously available parts of the score sound deeper and brighter — one also gets echoes of his score for Alien amid the sweeping orchestral passages. The second disc is given over to the reissue of the mid-'70s Inside Star Trek LP, which was a Columbia release — it's mostly talk by creator/producer Gene Roddenberry with William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, and Nichelle Nichols, with some comments by Isaac Asimov, some theme music, and some sound effects. It won't tell you much that the interviews accompanying the Sci-Fi Channel's rebroadcast of the uncut original series didn't, but it's handy to have as an improbable CD re-release.